Page 240 of Feralheart

Then I flooded the collar with everything I possessed.

Red light burst from my palm, bright enough it hurt to look at. Serpentine lines carved up past my elbows, visible through my sleeves, burning. I bit back a moan.

The collar fought back.

Decades of embedded spellwork activated all at once, runes flaring white. The metal heated under my palms, burning hotter, hotter, until I smelled my own flesh cooking. More blisters formed and burst.

I bit down on a scream.

Through the bond, I felt the collar trying to redirect my magic, to use me as fuel. If it could, it would drain me instead.

My magic pushed deeper, finding the seam where metal met scales, that place where flesh had grown around the collar for so long Aristus’s body didn’t know the difference anymore. I forced my way between metal and dragon, my magic peeling them apart one layer at a time.

The collar shrieked, though it wasn’t a sound I heard with my ears. This vibration rattled my bones and made my teeth ache.

It knew what I was doing, and it did not like it.

Too fucking bad.

My magic stuttered. A slip, the connection between my hands and my power going thin the way the bond had done inside the creature’s belly. The collar seized on that moment and pushed back, and the pain went from burning to something that didn’t have a name yet. I nearly let go.

Aristus’s body arched beneath us, his wings snapping wide. Fen’s arms wrapped around my waist, both of us holding on while Aristus tried to shake himself apart.

I dug deeper, pulling harder, and the metal bulged under my hands. Aristus’s scales heaved from underneath, his body trying to reject what had been killing him for twenty-three years.

One more push.

Just one more.

I shoved healing magic into the collar.

It shattered.

Pieces rained down, still glowing, still shrieking that high, thin sound that jarred through my bones. The pieces hit the canyon wall and went silent.

Aristus slumped to the ground beneath us.

Fen’s terror spiked through the bond.

Fates, Aristus was dead. I’d killed him. He’d collapse and Fen⁠—

Aristus breathed, deep and full, his ribs expanding the way they were meant to, the way they hadn’t since he was a hatchling.

I felt his wonder at air reaching the bottom of his lungs. The pins-and-needles sensation as circulation returned to places the collar had been strangling. The way his magic suddenly had room to move.

And underneath it all, joy pure enough to make my eyes burn.

Free, he shouted through the pack bond. Free. Free. Free.

Fen’s face had come undone. He pressed his forehead to the back of my head.

“This… Thank you.”

Aristus’s wings snapped open, the wingspan broader than I’d ever seen them.

And he sang.

But dragons didn’t sing. That’s what I’d been taught. They shrieked and roared and made vicious sounds during battle.